PAUL ROTHSTEIN was selling thermal copy paper (remember that stuff?) out of the back of a borrowed car in 1973. In a former life, he had been a business machine salesman, but suddenly realized that the “real” market was in consumable sales. Looking past the obvious (his traveling salesman selling-out-of-the-back-of-a-car routine), Rothstein saw that there was a growing demand for quality, customer-oriented, fast-turnaround printing.

Shortly thereafter, Canton, MA-based Copytech was born.

In those days, Copytech had a single one-color press and a desktop folder. If the press operator (one of three employees) called in sick, Rothstein had to run the press. Fortunately for him, the pressman rarely missed work, so he was able to concentrate on his main job: selling print. And, sell printing is exactly what Rothstein did—and with a passion. The more he sold, the more money he made, the more he invested in equipment, and the bigger the business grew.

Two decades later, Copytech had grown into a profitable, reputable company—and it had caught the eye of a powerful player that wanted to buy it. The deal went through without a hitch and, in 1995, Rothstein sold Copytech to Lanier Worldwide. The hitches came later, though, when his beloved company started heading south a few years after being sold.

“After several years of Lanier ownership, Paul wanted to purchase the company back,” explains John Rothstein, Nextgen’s current president, an attorney by trade and Paul Rothstein’s son. “When the opportunity came about in 2002 to buy back the depleted assets of Copytech, I started working on various aspects of the somewhat complicated transaction from my law office in New Jersey. (The company was renamed Next Generation Printing, or Nextgen, after the sell-back to the Rothsteins.) Before I knew it, I was spending half my day on Nextgen work—both in the area of law and business strategy.”